


Broken Glass

by Katydid_99



Series: If the Shoe Fits [1]
Category: Cinderella - All Media Types
Genre: After "Happily Ever After", F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, PTSD, Referenced Eating disorder, babies in love, glass slippers, they care for and support one another
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-17 06:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13071051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katydid_99/pseuds/Katydid_99
Summary: Living as a slave to your step family can leave its marks, though some are more visible than others...(Part 1 of the "If the Shoe Fits" series)





	Broken Glass

Marcus is just about to go into his room when a shriek and the sound of something shattering causes him to stop short of the door.

_What in heaven’s name...?_ he thinks, his hand still outstretched and centimeters from the doorknob. He looks down either end of the glistening hallway. Undoubtedly a servant or guard heard the ghastly sound as well, but no one has managed to get close enough to insist that he stay outside while someone else investigates. It happens every time something remotely head-turning happens in his general vicinity and he has to stop himself from rolling his eyes each time. _I served in the war, for goodness sake! Just because I’m royalty doesn’t mean I’m helpless._ So, with no one to stop him, Marcus steels himself and opens the door.

His heart skips a beat when the room is in full view. At first glance, everything seems fine. There’s no signs of a struggle and everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be. But at the center of the carpet sits a young woman, hugging her legs and burying her face into her knees so the thick, earthy waves of her hair cascade over her arms. The room’s only half lit with candles and she’s not very close, but even he can tell she’s shaking. She, incidentally, is Eleanor: his fiancee and future queen.

“Nori?” Marcus ask softly as he closes the door and takes a caustic step into their bedroom. Something crunches under his shoe, and it’s then he realizes the entire entryway is surrounded by colorful shards of glass.

“I didn’t mean to…” Eleanor whispers through a muffled fog of hair and tears as Marcus kneels and picks up one of the pieces. It’s short and roughly cylinder shaped, like a broken column from a Roman temple, and it sparkles radiantly in the candlelit room. Holding his breath, he carefully picks another piece of glass. The two fit together beautifully, creating the perfect model of the heel of a woman’s shoe.

A thousand memories strike him all at once. The most beautiful girl in the world dressed in moonlight and stained glass. Holding one of her delicate shoes as he watched her disappear into the night without so much as telling him her name. Days of tireless searching. Finding her again, now dressed in ash and bruises, and promising never to let her go again.

Frantic knocking rips him from his thoughts. “Your Majesty?!?” someone calls from outside. “Is everything alright? I thought I heard something!”

Marcus glaces from the glass to Eleanor to the door and forces his voice to sound neutral. “Everything’s fine,” he calls. “It was just- no one’s hurt. I’ll take care of it.”

The servant reluctantly agrees and walks away. Certain that they’re alone, Marcus carefully steps over the ruined shoe and sits next to Eleanor on the plush carpet. She instinctively unfolds from her fetal position into his chest and his arms encircle her shuddering form. He dares to take a glance at her soft, tan hands on his shoulders and sighs with relief to find them unharmed from broken glass. It’s only when she’s settled down a little more that he dares to speak. “What happened?” he asks quietly.

“She was here,” she mumbles after the longest of moments. “I- I know it’s impossible, but I swear to God she was right here in this room and… I just wanted to make her leave, I didn’t mean to…”

Eleanor doesn’t say any more, and doesn’t have to. Marcus knows exactly what she’s talking about. He found out the night she came to live with him, while he was showing her around the palace. She nearly wept at her new bedroom (they quickly decided on a shared room after a few months) and he joking asked her if she’d ever seen such hideous wallpaper. She admitted it’d been fifteen years since she’d been allowed to sleep on a real bed and his heart broke in two. Everything else came out from there: the dead parents, the bratty step-siblings, the endless chores, the abuse. “Cinderella”, they called her. A subhuman toy and a slave in her own home.The very idea of it makes Marcus’s blood boil.

Rage flares hotly in Marcus’s chest as he threads his hand through his fiancee’s hair. “I should have arrested her then and there,” he mumbled into her soft tresses.

“No,” Eleanor sighs as she sit up at last. Her face is tired and tear streaked, but no less lovely. “You couldn’t have proven anything there, and it’d reflect badly on you as a ruler.”

“I don’t care. No one gets to treat their child like that, whether they share blood or not.”

“Mada- I mean, my stepmother had a very sad life. She doesn’t know how to deal with it, so she takes it out on everyone around her. I just happened to get the grunt of it.”

“Did she hit her own daughters, too?”

“Not really, but I did catch Annabelle making herself throw up one night. She threatened to cut my hair off if I told, but I know she’s grateful. My stepmother puts a lot of pressure on her,” she smiles ruefully down at her skirt. “It’s only going to get worse for her from now on.”

It’s moments like this where Marcus wonders how he ever managed to catch Eleanor’s attention. Sure, he’s a prince, but Eleanor… his Nori is something else entirely. She’s spectacularly brave and wittily funny and amazingly beautiful right down to her core and so, so kind. Kind enough that she, who wears lash marks on her malnourished frame and wakes up breathless from terrors every night, doesn’t hate the source of her pain and empathizes for her other tormentors.

He remembers after the ball was over and he, drunk on love, spilled all his feeling out to his father. The king went about his business getting ready for bed with a bemused smile while his son cradled the precious shoe to his chest and bemoaned the loss of the maiden he spent the evening with and how she was completely out of his league anyway and deserved a prince or something.

(Admittedly, it was a little more than love he was drunk on.)

“Love at first sight,” his father had mused. On his part, Marcus was emotionally exhausted and was now content just to lay across the chase and study the glass slipper in the light, twisting it around and letting the tiny rainbows dance across the ceiling. “It’s a powerful thing. Exceptionally rare, but powerful.” He ruffled Marcus’s messy auburn hair before adding, “Best not let it go, my boy.”

And he didn’t plan to. He reaches over and pulls Eleanor into a hug. “She’s never going to come here,” he kisses the top of her head, “or anywhere near you ever again. She’ll have to get through me first.”

“I know,” Eleanor sighs, pulls away, and wipes her eyes with one hand while her other caresses his face. “I’m sorry about the mess. And worrying you.”

“It’s perfectly fine,” he catches her darker hand his his pale freckled one and gives it a kiss as well. “I’m sorry about your priceless, one-of-a-kind glass shoe that a magic old lady in a pumpkin gave you.”

She shrugs. “It’s okay. It pinched like the dickens, anyway.”

He laughed out loud, which sent her into a fit of giggles as well. The two sat laughing for a good while before sighing happily and going to ring for someone to help clean up the glass.


End file.
